Kristine L. Blair - Scholar

In this portion of the interview, Kristine L. Blair discusses
when she first became involved in the field of computers
and writing, her beginning as a teacher scholar, and how she sees changes in multimodal publishing.

Why don't you tell us how you got started in computers and
writing?

I got started in computers and writing more toward the
end of my doctoral work at Purdue University in the early '90s. My
initial dissertation research dealt with cultural studies in
composition classrooms. I was very interested in pop culture
approaches, and even further, I was interested in the image of women in
mass media, particularly advertising. My dissertation brought all those
emphases together. As I began to work on my dissertation, it was the
early '90's with the advent of listservs and Usenet groups; those types
of communication modes both in social and
academic contexts got me very interested in doing more with technology
in my own classes. Therefore, I started integrating the electronic
communication and having
students communicate online mostly through listservs but using other
types of communication software as well for synchronous and
asynchronous dialogue. As part of that, I naturally came to know Gail
Hawisher and Cindy Selfe, who would often make frequent trips to Purdue
for professional development for various colloquia series. Gail had
actually worked at Purdue for a time while I was there, but by the time
I was close to graduating, she had moved on to the University of
Illinois. Having role models in the field, Gail and Cindy, as well
as Patricia Sullivan at Purdue, really helped me understand that there
was this discipline of computers and composition. Purdue was a very
technologically rich campus, even for those of us working in English
studies, so we were able to teach in digital environments. I taught
tech writing in a computer lab. I taught composition in a computer lab.
Toward the end of my time at Purdue, I team-taught a desktop publishing
course with Pam Takayoshi, and I also taught that course once on my
own. Being able to integrate all of these technologies—some of which
are non-existent, dated, or have morphed into other things, like
HyperCard or PageMaker, etc.—I think I had a good grounding at
Purdue. When I moved on after my Ph.D. to my first position at Texas A
& M Corpus Christi, I was very, very fortunate. I wouldn't say
that Texas A & M Corpus Christi was a technologically rich
campus, but they did have technology. They had at least one Mac lab and
a number of PC labs. I was actually able to teach all of my courses
from the get–go—it was a 4–4 load—in a computer lab, first-year
writing, as well as technical writing. This was in 1994, so it was very
much the advent of the World Wide Web. I learned a lot about web design
and HTML from a systems administrator at A & M Corpus Christi,
a
wonderful guy named Jack Padgett, who was excited that there
was actually a faculty member who was interested in learning this
stuff. As I learned more, I actually started migrating my assignments
from print–based assignments to web–based assignments,
regardless of the context. It could have been a literature class, a
graduate-level course in the teaching of writing, a tech comm class, or
another type of desktop publishing course that I taught at Corpus
Christi. It was just an exciting time to be involved in all of that.

When did computers and writing become a scholarship
opportunity for you?

I think that one of the things that I did, early on, when
I was at A & M Corpus Christi, was I just finished my
dissertation. As you know, you're told you need to
go back to your dissertation, and you have to see what pieces of it fit
various venues whether in book form or article form. I was
very fortunate in that
I was able to get a lot of mileage from my
dissertation in terms of conferences as well as journal articles. I
took a particular piece of my dissertation and reworked it for Computers
and Composition print. That first
piece I published with
them was a piece called, "Ethnography and the Internet" talking about
how you could
do certain types of audience analysis assignments in digital
environments (Blair, 1996). I often had students do analyses of Usenet
groups and do what Jim Porter (1991) has referred to in his work as a "forum
analysis," looking at the discursive conventions, not just of
face–to–face groups but online groups. So, I had a pedagogical model of
that in my dissertation. What I did was rework that and published it
in Computers and Composition in 1996. That was my first Computers
and
Composition publication; I was very excited. Another piece that I
published early on with Computers and Composition was a piece
that
evolved out of my work at A & M Corpus Christi. When I was
teaching there, given the region, there were a lot of Hispanic–American
students enrolled, so it would be very interesting to see the
differences of perspective between Hispanic–American students and Anglo
students as they discussed cultural issues in the context of
first–year writing. There would be some heated debates. I took
advantage of that through my use of the Daedalus Integrated Writing
Environment (DIWE) for online chats, and I was able to talk about some
of those conflicts that occurred. I published a piece that I think
it was called "Literacy in the Contact Zone" in C&C print
in
1998. By that time, I was already at Bowling Green. I was at Bowling
Green in 1996. I left A & M in 1996 and came to Bowling Green
at
that time. So it was great to take what was going on in your classroom
and theorize what was going on, not just in terms of the way technology
was mediating the communication process but the way in which culture
was mediating the communication process. I felt very fortunate to
have those opportunities, and I got more involved with computers and
writing as a discipline at the C & W conference, which I
started
attending regularly starting in 1995.

When you applied for your job at Bowling Green (1996), did
the job description
have computer–based learning or incorporation of technology
in the classroom? Or was that
something you brought to the table?

It's hard to say, because I don't have the job
description in front of me to know what they wanted. I think originally
the Rhetoric and Writing doctoral program wanted someone who could
teach research methodology, and I certainly could do that, though that
wasn't my expertise. I think they wanted more of a generalist, and I
fit
that bill. I was very fortunate to get the job. I brought a
technological perspective to the job. Rick Gebhardt was chair at the
time of my hire, and I found Bowling Green very flexible in allowing
you
to schedule classes in computer labs. I was always able to get a
computer lab. Any time you move to a new institution you have to work
out, "Who do I contact for what?" I think that's very true for computer
space. Therefore, you figure out: What scheduling people do you work
with? What
department secretary you talk to? How supportive is your chair in that
respect? I always felt pretty fortunate about it because I was able
from the get-go to schedule any course I wanted in a computer lab. I
did that with the earliest course I taught at Bowling Green which was
English 381: Grammar and Writing. I was teaching a grammar class in a
computer lab where I had students developing online units for sentence
combining. It is just sort of interesting how your work evolves; I
always thought of myself as a computer person and never thought of
myself as a grammar person. By combining the two, I was able to develop
that expertise and ultimately ended up writing a grammar textbook with
two of my colleagues. People love grammar; the royalties are great.

What was your first digital text that you got published?

That's really interesting. Pam Takayoshi and I do have a
digital text. In 1997, we published an early version of our
introduction to the collection Feminist Cyberscapes in Kairos.
Jim
Kalmbach (2006) from Illinois State University has a historical piece
that he published in Kairos several years ago where he refers
to that
piece as one of the first menued hypertexts that was published in our
field. I'm sort of amused by that, because if you go look at the
piece it's very, very basic. It's black text on a white
background with links on the side. There is a navigation structure. So,
I think on one level that it is great, and sort of an honor, to have
that
text be thought of in that way. That was the first digital piece I
published. I think overall when you look at my body of work, I'm less
of a person who publishes in multimodal form than I am a person who
writes about the politics of acquiring the literacies for students and
faculty to publish in multimodal form, even though I do have some
digital
publications that I have worked on with colleagues and with graduate
students.

How did you make a case for your first webtext (Blair & Takayoshi, 1997) to be
included for your tenure and promotion?

I don't know that I particularly had to, to be quite
honest; I think part of it was a matter of balance. If I had only web-based publications, I don't know that I would have been tenured. I don't
know that anyone would have been tenured at Bowling Green or elsewhere.
I think it's a matter of showing, as I do now with folks going up for
tenure promotion, that it's "What are the intellectual questions that
your work addressed? What's the larger umbrella issue or set of issues?
And how did various things that you do—from an edited collection to a
web–based version of an introduction that went through a review
process, a chapter or an article you
published in Computers and Composition print—how do all of
those
elements fit
together to make you seem the well rounded teacher–scholar?" That
was the kind of case I think I made, and I think that's the kind of
case we should all continue to make. Even for digital scholars. We have
to talk in the language of the oppressor. *laughs* I think that Cixous (1976)
talks about it in those terms, in her discussion of "Écriture
Féminine," in this idea that if we really want to enable change, then
we have to talk in these new venues, but we also have to publish in
traditional print venues as well to show our colleagues what's
happening, what's over here, and what's over here become closer
together, and there's not that kind of gap.

Where and when did you see the switch from print to
multimodal? It seems there is a large draw for people to gravitate
toward publication in the multimodal forms.

Well, I think the advantage for the field of computers
and writing is that we have a recursive relationship
between theory and practice. We write about things that happen in our
classroom spaces. However, we don't write about them in what some might
refer to as anecdotal ways: "here's what I did in my classroom, and here's
why it was so great." Initially in the discipline, there might have
been that trend toward the utopic, and Gail and Cindy have talked about
that in their earlier work. Clearly, as we started evolving the
pedagogy, we started noticing problems in how students were
communicating with some of the cultural conflicts that can occur with
some of the race, gender, and class issues involving the politics of
access. As we did more and more of that, wanting to document the
digital things we were actually doing, we clearly came to understand
that print was an insufficient medium. How could we have our
students develop websites? How could we ourselves be developing
syllawebs, and other sorts of online curricular materials, and not have
a way to showcase them? This very much ties into tenure and promotion,
because in so many institutions tenure and promotion is currently a
print-based process. When I went up for tenure, I was literally
printing out copies of online syllabi, and I thought, "This is
ridiculous. This is just ridiculous." I would include URLs and things
like that. I think many institutions, including Bowling Green, have
gotten much more progressive about that, that you can include CD-ROMs
and maybe include a print component. It's clear that some of our work
is hybrid in nature. A great deal of it for computers and writing
specialists will in fact be online. So, I think that's part of that
shift, the clear exigency from moving from the print to the digital. At
the same time with the exception of Kairos, there are fewer
spaces in
which to publish your work. Mike Palmquist at Colorado State has done
some wonderful work
with the WAC Clearinghouse, and the Writing
Across the Disciplines just created another space. I think that
to some extent Computers and Composition Online has created
that space
as well. Faculty and graduate students are looking for spaces where they can
not only publish a text online, but truly use that process to
experiment with digital video, digital audio, to have a truly
multimodal composition that's published in a peer-reviewed journal. I
think we've come a long way; however, I think we have a long way to go
in a lot
of that, but we're getting there as a discipline.